Africa’s richest man and president of Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote, said the Group is working on executing five key projects that would help boost development in Africa.
In a recent meeting with business leaders in Cote d’Ivoire, Dangote Okonjo–Iweala, Bill Gates, Mo Ibrahim, Bloomberg receive international honour said the projects were already in the works and would cut across different sectors of the economy including oil and gas, fertiliser, agriculture and cement manufacturing.
“We have about five major projects that we are aiming to execute that will help in projecting Africa as a major producer and an exporter of key products,” Dangote said in a conversation with Sudanese-British billionaire businessman, Mo Ibrahim, in Abidjan, the Ivorian capital.
The meeting was part of the 2019 Ibrahim Governance Weekend held in Abidjan April 5-7, which debated and discussed African migrations, youth and jobs.
Among these five key projects, Dangote said, is the oil refinery located around the Lekki-Epe axis of Nigeria’s commercial hub, Lagos, which is expected to be completed by 2022.
Estimated at a cost as high as $13 billion, according to Dangote, the refinery will produce 650,000 barrel per day of crude oil that will help in placing Nigeria as one of the largest exporters of petroleum products on the continent.
“What we are trying to do is to replicate exactly what we did in cement. Nigeria used to be number two in the world after the US in terms of cement importation but now we are self-sufficient and by this year, we will be the largest exporters of fuel in Africa with 8 million tonnes of extension,” he said.
The project will also include building a petrochemical industry that will have the capacity to produce 1.3 million tonnes of polypropylene and polyethylene that will enable Africa’s biggest oil producer to become the second-largest exporter of petroleum products in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Dangote Group also has in works a fertiliser plant that will enable it to produce as much as 3 million tonnes of urea and ammonia.
“We also have the gas pipeline and then we have the cement which we are doing about $2 billion worth of expansion in the cement manufacturing space,” he said.
Dangote currently has cement factories in about 14 countries. It has factories operational in 11 countries while some other new cement facilities are currently ongoing.
In agriculture, Dangote is building a 1 million metric-tonne rice production plant with the use of integrated power.
Of all these projects, Dangote said the most challenging for the company is the oil refinery as the firm had to resort to building its own port to enable shipment of equipment since the ports available lack the desired capacity. However, the company has been able to navigate through as it opened its eyes to see the lack of infrastructure in Africa.
“The real challenge of the project for us is having to build our own port because none of the ports in Nigeria could actually take the weight,” Dangote said.
“We brought in seven regenerators from Korea weighing 3,000 metric tonnes to regenerate the crude. The ports in Nigeria could only take 150 tonnes and we are also faced with the roads as we had to build a special road that all our equipment was going to pass,” he said.
According to him, some 365 million cubic metres of sand got from the sea was pumped into the site.
“We brought the two world biggest dredgers to work there for about 10-11 months. The refinery with about 136,000 piles is the largest you can ever find anywhere in the world,” he said.
MICHAEL ANI
